Aligning Strategy and Execution in a Global Cloud Computing Enterprise

Has the business world become faster at shifting, or are we just too slow to keep up? It’s no secret that global enterprises increasingly face the business challenge of aligning high-level strategies with day-to-day operations across multiple regions. The growing complexities of market demands, resource optimization, and the need for agility in decision-making largely influence these challenges.

In today’s fictional use case, GTech Solutions — a multinational technology corporation — implements Quantive StrategyAI to transform its strategy execution. You’ll see how our solution empowers the leadership to connect strategy with execution, improve performance, and increase agility.

GTech Solutions, an enterprise company for cloud computing services with operations in over 50 countries and 15,000+ employees, struggles to translate its corporate strategy into actionable plans across diverse markets. The organization faces several key issues:

• Misalignment between global objectives and regional initiatives
• Inconsistent execution of strategic priorities across different business units
• Difficulty in tracking progress and measuring the impact of strategic initiatives
• Slow response to market changes and emerging opportunities

These challenges are not rare. In fact, 61% of senior executives admit that their organizations often struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and its day-to-day implementation (The Economist Intelligence Unit).

GTech Solutions implements Quantive's comprehensive strategy management platform to address these issues. The solution provides:

Strategic planning and collaboration

Any strategy creation or revision needs to start with understanding what is currently happening in the business. GTech uploads business documents to Quantive StrategyAI and instantly gets strategic insights to guide their decisions. This allows them to:

• Analyze opportunities and threats on the horizon
• Decide on strategic choices using proven strategic frameworks
• Create executive summaries to help align stakeholders
• Generate action plans for revised or new strategies
• Collaborate digitally on initiatives and goals 
• Activate their plans and align the business

This guided process powered by AI enables GTech leaders to quickly explore different strategic directions and reach consensus and alignment before implementation.

Let's explore this process in more detail. 

GTech leaders want to explore opportunities that could drive growth. After providing context on current performance and desired outcomes, Quantive StrategyAI suggests a hypothesis to explore, including:

1. Investing in AI research could lead to breakthrough innovations for GTech
2. Emerging markets could lead to substantial growth (particularly in the Asia-Pacific region)

Next, GTech analyzes each hypothesis using the suggested strategic frameworks. They land on a new market to drive growth in the Asia-Pacific region. Quantive StrategyAI generates an executive summary and an action plan for this strategic choice, which provides GTech leaders with a starting place for effective collaboration. 

Instead of weeks and months, GTech agrees on new strategic initiatives to align their business, which leads to the next important piece: Executing those initiatives. 

This process helps leaders have essential conversations that improve business outcomes and ensure that strategic insights lead to effective execution. By aligning initiatives with long-term goals, fostering collaboration across teams, and providing real-time updates, Quantive StrategyAI empowers GTech to continuously adapt and thrive, covering the full cycle from strategy creation to successful execution.

Strategy execution and alignment

Quantive StrategyAI makes it seamless to turn GTech's strategy into a clear set of strategic objectives. These objectives align with the strategic direction they would pick at the previous step. The best thing is that they are instantly generated through advanced AI. By tying objectives to key initiatives, the platform fosters a sense of ownership and accountability across all levels of the organization. The process of goal planning and setting is crucial, as research shows that companies grow 30% faster when they have written business plans. (Journal of Management Sciences).

The global strategy cascades to regional and functional levels using Quantive StrategyAI's goal alignment features. This process ensures that every team and individual understands how their work contributes to the overall mission. At each level, the platform helps assign ownership of specific goals for clear accountability and continuous progress tracking.

Real-time progress tracking

Quantive StrategyAI's evaluation capabilities allow GTech to monitor real-time progress on key initiatives. This addresses a common issue many organizations face: 

Only 59% of organizations review progress against strategic priorities (The Global State of Strategy).

85% of leadership teams spend less than one hour per month reviewing and discussing strategy (Harvard Business Review). 

The link between goals, tasks, and KPIs provides a clear line of sight into the impact of initiatives and potential roadblocks to success. These insights at their fingertips allow GTech to identify areas requiring attention and quickly make data-driven decisions. This agility is crucial, as companies investing more time and effort into strategy execution are three times more likely to report above-average growth (PwC survey). 

When GTech needs to adapt its plans, Quantive StrategyAI is ready again to guide it through the revisions required to achieve better outcomes. 

By using Quantive's strategy management platform, GTech Solutions expects to achieve significant improvements during the next 2 to 3 quarters:

1. Enhanced alignment: The company aims for 90% of employees to report a clear understanding of how their work contributes to company goals, up from 45% before implementation. This is impressive, considering only 41% of U.S. employees typically know what their organization stands for. (Gallup) 
2. Improved execution: The company expects a 25% reduction in project turnaround times due to improved team communication and alignment.
3. Faster decision-making: The time required to make and implement strategic decisions should decrease by 50%, allowing for more agile responses to market changes.
4. Increased transparency: Leadership gains visibility into the progress of initiatives across all regions, facilitating more informed resource allocation and prioritization.
5. Better performance: GTech's revenue growth could be 20% higher than the previous year, outperforming industry averages.
    

This use case demonstrates the power of an end-to-end strategy management platform in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and day-to-day operations in a global enterprise. 

By providing tools for planning, alignment, execution, and evaluation, Quantive empowers GTech Solutions to:

1. Create a clear, actionable strategy
2. Align global objectives with regional initiatives
3. Track progress and measure impact effectively
4. Respond quickly to changing market conditions

This new implementation highlights why having a unified place for strategy and strategic initiatives is crucial, especially for large, complex organizations working across multiple regions. GTech Solutions believes adopting Quantive StrategyAI can turn its ambitious goals into real results. This results in driving sustainable growth and helping them stay ahead in this highly competitive business world.